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 When Tony, the don of television's Soprano family, put his increasingly forgetful mother in a retirement home, she was so angry that she tried to have him whacked.

Maybe he should have considered a robot to keep her company in her own house.

Researchers are indeed hard at work exploring the uses of robots as helpmates to the elderly who want to stay in their homes. In a collaborative project between Purdue University and the University of Washington supported by the National Science Foundation, researchers are investigating the psychological effects of robotic dogs on the lives of the elderly.

"We know that the health and emotional well-being of older people are boosted when they have contact with animals," said Dr. Alan M. Beck, a principal investigator with the project and a professor in the veterinary school at Purdue. "We want to see what will happen when the animals are robots."

In a pilot study, Dr. Beck and Dr. Nancy E. Edwards, an assistant professor of nursing specializing in gerontology, observed and interviewed healthy elderly people as they interacted with a robotic dog.

The people quickly projected emotional feelings onto the robot, Dr. Edwards said. "Look, he likes me," was a typical comment when the robot approached.

The emotions projected onto the robot dogs grew, Dr. Edwards observed. "At the beginning, we asked, `What does the robot dog need to survive?' and people answered, `A battery,' " she said. But after about a week, the answers became, "It needs someone to talk to" and "It needs someone to pay attention to it."

The next step for the researchers is to give robotic dogs to elderly people for six weeks to see how the relationships develop.

Dr. Beck said that emotional bonds between humans and robot pets may be therapeutic, alleviating loneliness and depression.

"At first I was worried that we would replace a human-animal bond with a robot-human bond," he said, adding that such a substitution might be an instance in which technology weakened important natural relationships. But despite such concerns, Dr. Beck soon realized that a robot-human bond had advantages. Elderly people might not be fit enough to take a real dog for walks, for example, or might forget feeding times.

"With a robot, they may get some sense of companionship," he said, without the risk of harming a living creature. Talking to a robot dog may be a bit like talking to an infant, he said, enabling people to enjoy some nurturing behaviors.

Other research sponsored by the National Science Foundation is directed toward testing prototypes of humanoid robots that may one day help the elderly in their homes, reminding them of necessary tasks or playing a card game with them.

A robotic assistant created by researchers from Carnegie Mellon and other universities comes equipped with a speech synthesizer to utter questions like, "Have you taken your aspirin?" and voice recognition software to understand the replies. As a backup, the robot, nicknamed Pearl, has a computer monitor attached at chest level to display what it is saying.

Dr. Sara Kiesler, a professor of human-computer interactions at Carnegie Mellon who worked on Pearl, wants to design service robots that are polite as well as efficient.

"We don't want to create robots that take on the worse aspects of a rigid nurse," she said. "We want to make sure that people don't get talked down to by their robots."

iRobot, a robot manufacturing company in Somerville, Mass., is not worried about robot charm school for its products, said Colin Angle, chief executive of the company. At iRobot, he said, humans will do all of the talking.

The company makes a robot that Mr. Angle hopes will one day find use among the elderly. The chunky red machine, which looks like an overhead projector mounted on six wheels, contains a Web server and a video camera. The camera can zoom in on its environment, including, perhaps, elderly people sitting in their living rooms.

The robot and its camera can be activated by any authorized person who logs on to the server — for example, children living far from their parents' home. "You see what the robot sees and hear what the robot hears, because the robot has a wireless audio and video connection to its Internet cable modem," Mr. Angle said.

The robot transmits real-time compressed video at about 5 to 10 frames per second. Once the image arrives on the monitors of viewers far away, these viewers can click on any part of the image they want the robot to approach. At the click, the robot starts moving at a stately four inches per second toward that destination, using sonic and infrared sensors to avoid obstacles. In that way, the viewer can drive the robot, bringing it closer, for instance, toward people sitting on the sofa.

At present, the robot, called Co-Worker, is sold for high-end wireless videoconferencing and related uses and would need to be adapted to work with the elderly, Mr. Angle said. Applications may include remote monitoring of vital signs, as well as virtual visits from family and health-care professionals.

Will the elderly accept such robot presences in their lives? "People, even the most technophobic, might be disposed to live with robots if this meant they could remain in their homes," he said.

Dr. Michael Lesk, an officer at the National Science Foundation who oversees some of the agency's research into domestic robots, said that in some ways, progress in the field depends more on the people than on the robots.

"It's possible that robots could serve as companions or pets for the elderly," he said. "We don't know yet what people are willing to turn over to machines."

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